The Quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk and Richard Wagner by Hilda Meldrum Brown (review)

What is a Gesamtkunstwerk, and how does it work? What kind of Kunstwerk could be qualified as "Gesamt"? Hilda Meldrum Brown's quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk explores a vast range of visual, vegetal, literary, and musical works from eighteenth-century landscape gardens to the more industrial setting of the 1976 "Centenary Ring" production in Bayreuth, asking which of these "deserve" the title of "total work of art," and which do not.

The book's title immediately raises a question: Why avoid the easier "Richard Wagner and the quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk"? The inversion shifts the focus on the concept at stake, showing that the quest began before Wagner and did not stop after him. The title tells us that "the Quest" is not only Wagner's enterprise but rather a collective one in which the composer participates. That Wagner enjoys a special status among the participants is clear from the outset of the introduction, beginning not with the concept of Gesamtkunst werk, as the title may lead us to expect, but with the "unique" figure of Wagner. The "source of this uniqueness," argues Brown, "lies … in Wagner's spectacular success in articulating a lofty vision by means of a fusion or synthesis of two major art forms, drama and music" (p. 1). This statement clearly articulates the book's leading argument: in the collective search for the "total work of art," Wagner was uniquely positioned to conduct it successfully.

The argument unfolds in three parts: the first presents different attempts at "the Quest" before Wagner, and the second and third deal with the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk in theory and in practice—which shows, again, who plays the principal role in the adventure. Part 1 presents "works of quality and distinction which come close to achieving the status of Gesamtkunstwerk," as Brown announces in the introduction (p. 10). As "Gesamt-prototypes," we may call them, the author selected eighteenth-century case studies in three disciplines: the landscape garden (chap. 1), visual arts (chap. 2), and literature (chap. 3). In the first chapter, Brown offers her most original contribution by throwing landscape gardening into the competition for the title of "total work of art." Discussing the characteristics of four gardens, English (Stowe Landscape Gardens, Stourhead, and Rousham) and German (DessauWörlitz), she outlines fascinating "leitmotivic webs of anticipation and recollection familiar in Wagnerian opera" (p. 28) as well as a "sense of unity" that ultimately raise them to the status of "Gesamtkunstwerk landscape gardens" (pp. 36–37). Chapter 2 begins with a brief overview of Romantic aesthetic theories, presenting Friedrich von Schlegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling's ideas on the fusion of different art forms as the origins of the concept of "total work of art." To form a Gesamtkunstwerk, however, artistic elements cannot be randomly accumulated but have to merge into a "meaningful 'reunion'" (p. 43). At this point Brown turns to the visual arts, concentrating on Philipp Otto Runge's large-scale project entitled Die Tagezeiten (The Times of Day). This incomplete tetralogy of individual but connected drawings is evaluated as a bold attempt to move the boundaries of visual arts, an experimentation "sufficiently developed to bring [this] work decisively into the arena of Gesamtkunstwerk" (p. 44). Like the four landscape gardens discussed in chapter 1, Runge's Die Tageszeiten "might without too much demur be seen as being on a level of magnitude appropriate to a 'total work of art'" (p. 53). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust drama is presented in chapter 3 as another potential "candidate" in the quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk. Brown discusses Goethe's attempts to find a suitable composer to set his drama into music, revealing his preoccupations with the ways words and music could interact. Having considered Faust's candidature, however, the author concludes that verbal and musical elements...